That may not match how people in a handful of big, prosperous cities see things. After a disastrous and historic crash, housing is booming in places like San Francisco and New York. Bidding wars are back, and the question is not whether the real estate market is recovering but whether new bubbles are inflating.

But there’s another reality that is more important for the national economy. Except in a few booming markets, housing is nowhere close to pulling its economic weight. Consider this:

Investment in residential property remains a smaller share of the overall economy than at any time since World War II, contributing less to growth than it did even in previous steep downturns in the early 1980s, when mortgage rates hit 20 percent, or the early 1990s, when hundreds of mortgage lenders failed.

Barry Ritholtz adds his thoughts on the NYT, Neil Irwin piece in the previous link.http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-04-25/where-are-a...I have spent an inordinate amount of time on the subject of residential housing. I wanted to supplement Irwin’s column with two additional observations. These involve homeowner equity and buyer psychology. My view is they impose a huge additional drag on the housing recovery.

PF (The housing as an investment thread was so long I couldn't figure out who to reply to with this. I'm X-posting this to METaR as well.)

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